Google is poised to bring Near Field Communication NFC to the United States in a big way this upcoming year. The company is reportedly preparing to test a mobile NFC payment system in New York and San Francisco that will rollout in the upcoming months. Google has purchased and is installing thousands of VeriFone Near Field Communication readers at various retailers in these two tech-progressive cities. According to Bloomberg sources, Google is planning to bring all your financial accounts, gift card balances, store loyalty cards and coupon offers to your handset using this NFC technology. This stored information is accessible on your handset can be used to make purchases on the go without the need to pull out your wallet.

Though exciting, neither Google nor VeriFone has confirmed these plans. Such a pilot program would not be surprising as Google is already experimenting with NFC in Portland, Oregon. The Mountain View company recently launched a version of its Hotpot business that lets store owners display a NFC-enabled sign in their retail establishment. Android users with a compatible handset like the Nexus S can scan the sign and receive special offers, store information and more on the fly. Apple is also reportedly considering NFC technology and may introduce its own system that permits payments through iTunes.

If everything goes according to plan, the final version of Firefox 4 should be released March 22, according to a message posted on Firefox official forum:

"As of now, there are no known issues that would stop us from shipping RC1 as final on March 22nd is the day we would ship"

The release candidate of Firefox 4 was launched one week ago; we have used it a lot during that time and found no significant bugs. Still, if a significant issue should arise before March 22, the ship date for the final version would be moved and we would get an RC2 version instead.

It was just three days ago when AMD launched the new graphic king and now its NVIDIA turn to show something new. The EVGA GTX 460 2WIN is made of two GTX 460 GPUs (700MHz) resulting in 672 CUDA cores, 2GB DDR5 (3600MHz), 3xDVI and 1xMini-HDMI ports.

As you can see its not the monster geared to fight with the titans, but its more of a budget card offering better performance for less money.

According to EVGA, the GTX 460 2WIN is slightly faster than the GTX 580 ($500+) and will be less expensive. Since a standard GTX 460 costs about $160 I expect the dual-core fella will be as expensive as $320.

There is no base for conclusions yet, since the card is not available and there are no benchmarks done.

Google is pretty good at finding what I need, but when researching a more obscure topic, most of the results point to the same nasty link spam site that not just gets in the way, but is terribly annoying too.

The feature is starting to roll out today look for a "Block all example.com results" link next to the Cached and Similar links. After hitting the link, any future searches will exclude the site you blocked. A notification appears if some search results were excluded because their site is blocked and you can choose to view them. You can manage blocked sites from the settings page.

During the 4 days of January (27-31), Harris Interactive conducted an online survey among 2,364 U.S. online adults aged 18+ to determine whether they trust using their tablets and smartphones for transferring sensitive data. The results show that those with tablets are more willing to do so than smartphone users. Here are the finding:

Of online adults who own and use a tablet, 48% transfer sensitive data, 42% of which do that for personal use and 20% for business/professional use. When it comes to smartphone users, 30% of respondents transfer sensitive data, 26% of which for personal use and 14% for business/professional use. Overall, business/professional users are more likely to be at least confident in the security of the data that is being transferred over their smartphone or tablet PC than those who use it for personal use.

Gender wise, men are more likely than women to say they are at least confident in the security of the data that is being transferred over their smartphone or tablet PC (47% vs. 34% respectively).

As for the age groups, unsurprisingly younger adults aged 18-34 (52%) are more likely than adults aged 35-44 (41%), 45-54 (28%) and 55+ (33%) to be at least confident in the security of the data that is being transferred over their smartphone or tablet PC, As Following:

• Smartphone users ages 18-34 (37%), 35-44 (33%) and 45-54 (21%) are more likely than those aged 55+ (9%) to use it to transfer sensitive data.
• Tablet owners ages 18-34 (61%) and 35-44 (56%) are more likely than those ages 45-54 (33%) and 55+ (20%) to use their devices to transfer sensitive data.

Finally in terms of the security perception, 18% of respondents are extremely/very confident, while 15% are not at all confident in the security of the data that is being transferred over their device(s).